


hurt the fly

by prettydizzeed



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Access Intimacy, Author is disabled, Chronic Fatigue, Chronic Pain, Depression, Disability, Gen, Interabled Relationship, Joe centric, M/M, Mentions of Suicide Ideation, Non-Chronological, author has chronic pain, some injury/violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:35:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26132779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettydizzeed/pseuds/prettydizzeed
Summary: “One to ten?” Booker would ask, grinning, and Yusuf would put on a mock-serious face and reply, “Four-point-three; only slightly better than getting kicked by a horse,” or, waking up after a round of gunshots to the chest, “Like a six.” As a diagnostic tool, it fell apart in the face of the sheer amount of options for the worst pain he’d ever felt, but that was the fun part.“You two are so morbid,” Andy would say, rolling her eyes at them, but sometimes Yusuf would look up from a stab wound, shake the blood off his hand, and say “Yesterday was worse,” and he could tell she was trying not to laugh.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani
Comments: 45
Kudos: 212





	hurt the fly

**Author's Note:**

> title is from the poem of the same title by Andrea Gibson, about chronic illness (a different poem than the one the opening quote is from)
> 
> i have chronic knee pain and love projecting onto my favorite characters so. enjoy

“In the house of your compassion, it’s possible illness will be the landline.”

–Andrea Gibson

  
  


Days like this, Yusuf, bizarrely, thinks of Captain America. Not because of the part where he was too old for the world he found himself in—Booker was always the bigger fan of that—but because of the ice. 

He wonders if it hurt.

He feels frozen. Body in stasis, body with a baseline of catastrophe. A natural disaster. There’s an avalanche of synapses at every movement, a long chain of sparks demanding he stay a statue or a fossil or—he doesn’t want to say _a prisoner,_ it feels inaccurate and disrespectful to the body that has borne him through so much, for so long. A more accurate example, then: every time Andy cranks their latest vehicle obtained through methods of questionable legality, the “check engine” light flickers to life before the engine can even consider rumbling, and he thinks, _Yeah. Me, too._

*

“What’s it like?” Booker had asked once, way early on, barely past a year since they met. Nicolò had looked ready to bare his teeth, but Yusuf rubbed his shoulder soothingly and then tilted his head, considering. 

“Sometimes it feels like acid is burning through my bones in both directions, and sometimes it feels like they’re being ground to dust, like they’re the mortar and pestle with nothing left but each other and still going.” He pressed his lips together for a moment. “The end of each bone is a saw blade,” he said, gesturing with his fingers how the teeth fit together.

They made it a game, eventually, finding the right metaphor for that day’s agony. “Slow-motion small-scale pyrotechnics?” Booker would ask, or, “Corrosive synovial fluid?” and Yusuf would either nod or shake his head, but always laugh through the grimace. Nicky was spectacularly bad at it, the few times he tried to join in, but that was pretty hilarious, too, so it’s not like it didn’t help.

When Booker got back late one night after waiting for someone he’d helped to the hospital to be cleared to go home, he burst in to where he knew Yusuf would be laying on the beat-up couch, trying to convince himself to stand and walk to bed. Booker sat down so fast his chair slid a bit and leaned forward, clasping his hands together. 

“ _Joe,_ ” he said, completely failing to bite back the grin, “they’ve got this thing called a pain scale.” 

The ritual got more elaborate, after that. “One to ten?” Booker would ask, grinning, and Yusuf would put on a mock-serious face and reply, “Four-point-three; only slightly better than getting kicked by a horse,” or, waking up after a round of gunshots to the chest, “Like a six.” As a diagnostic tool, it fell apart in the face of the sheer amount of options for the worst pain he’d ever felt, but that was the fun part. 

“You two are so morbid,” Andy would say, rolling her eyes at them, but sometimes Yusuf would look up from a stab wound, shake the blood off his hand, and say “Yesterday was worse,” and he could tell she was trying not to laugh.

*

His right knee gives out halfway into the kitchen. Nicky’s beside him immediately, hand on his elbow, clearly evaluating the situation in a split second and making the call that down is easier than up at the moment. He lowers them to the floor, and Yusuf exhales hard. 

“I walk the way a ship sinks,” he quotes, and Nicky nods, short and firm.

“I gladly embrace my fate as a mermaid.” 

It’s so ridiculous, and he’s so serious about it, that all the maudlin seeps out of Yusuf and into the tile. “What did we say about extending metaphors, my heart?”

The corner of Nicky’s mouth lifts. “I’d say it qualifies as a dire circumstance.”

That’s what it takes for Yusuf to realize: fuck, Nicky is worried. And yes—there’s the wrinkle on the left side of his mouth, the perfectly vertical line between his eyebrows, the deep and genuine concern practically screaming from the set of his shoulders. Every angle of his joints announces it; Nicky is crouched beside him, still and precise, the way he only ever is behind a sniper rifle or in a personal crisis. Like he needs to calculate each move perfectly. Like he could wait all day.

“Oh,” Yusuf says, and he would bet Nicky could name the exact number of degrees his jaw moves when he nods. 

“Talk to me, _tesoro_ ,” Nicky says, too weary to even be considered pleading, and Yusuf blows out a long breath and tips his head back against the cabinet and does. 

“The flag’s at half-mast, but the cannons are intact,” he says, and Nicky laughs, barely even a wince to it. He sighs, and says it with his eyes closed: “I don’t know how to keep doing this. There’ve been moments this month I don’t even have a benchmark for, and I’m afraid of what happens if we’re mid-mission and I can’t push through anymore.”

“We cover you,” Nicky says, like it’s simple as that. “The way you cover Andy now. Just try to tell me you’ve ever thought she’s holding us back.” Yusuf looks at him quietly; he can’t, of course. 

“How many lifetimes…” he says, and isn’t sure if he means past or future. He rubs a hand over his face. “It’s the stuff of Greek myths, right, torment that doesn’t change. Maybe they were onto something.”

Nicky swallows. “I wish I could find you a support group or something. I don’t know. Yusuf, _habibi,_ just tell me what to do and it’s done.”

“I used to have one,” he says with a dry, tired laugh, “sort of. Something close enough.”

Nicky nods, and Yusuf can tell how much it’s paining (oh, the irony) him to not be able to launch himself at the problem until it’s obliterated. “I can form some very detailed opinions on the disability status of superheroes, if it’d make you feel better,” he says, and Yusuf laughs, which was the point, but honestly, it probably wouldn’t. It’d probably just remind him of all he has to mourn.

“What about outside of the mission?” Nicky asks quietly. “Please, _cuore mio,_ I can only know what you tell me.”

Yusuf sighs. Meets his eyes and feels raw with it, bare and exhausted. “I know.”

*

Andy gets sore, now. She was never really one to complain much before, vocal cynicism about the state of the world notwithstanding, but desperate times and all that, and it makes Nicky’s jaw tighten in that barely-perceptible way that Yusuf is, even after all this time, usually the only one to notice. 

“It’s fine,” Yusuf tells him in Arabic, touching his elbow, and Nicky nods slightly. Still, Nicky tilts his head, and:

“Not all gods are able-bodied, boss.” 

“I know,” she says, “you read us that one book in the 90s on the ride to Berlin. Eight fucking hours, Nicky.” 

He grins. “It was revolutionary work.” 

She rolls her eyes, but she doesn’t bemoan her now-fallible body within Yusuf’s earshot after that, and he isn’t sure how to feel about it. Any scholar he’s read would have a field day, but ultimately there’s no easy solution for where to place her body: after thousands of years without it, is mortality a disability to adapt to? Should the two of them be trying to find common ground on the deck of the same boat? 

He folds the thought into fourths and tucks it away to revisit later, deciding: maybe, but right now, he doesn’t want to bond, or try to lay out the tracks to a place where she won’t hate herself (or at least, not for this) in hopes that she’ll follow them. 

He just wants to sleep.

That’s a very complicated request for him, though, so he lays down on the couch with a book instead, something theoretical and dense but thrilling, when he can manage the energy to be excited about it. When he steps quietly into their room at 4am, Nicky wakes up immediately, smiles softly at him when he stands to let him in the bed. Yusuf tries not to count how long he lies awake with his arm around him.

*

One really bad night, he’s hoping Booker and Andy can’t make out the words from the other side of the wall, but he’s doubting the wood is thick enough.

“I cannot understand why you would want this,” he says, sharp and heavy, naming one of the many swords hanging above them. “You’ll, what, just take care of me for all time? And I’m supposed to pray you’ll never come to resent me for it?”

“We weren’t meant to be alone.” Nicolò has said it before, and even when as upset as he is now, but never like this. Like he means not only humanity in the broad sense but also that the two of them were not meant to do this without each other. “And I cannot decipher how I am to respond when you won’t believe me that what you describe sounds like paradise. You take care of me, Yusuf, you have every day since the beginning, have saved me from drought and hunger and disease even when the death wouldn’t have lasted, have carried me through depression and terror and crushing grief. I do not want to live without you because I did not know life until I knew you, and I want to _share_ that, my heart, all of it, even the parts that are messy and painful.”

Yusuf is crying by the time Nicolò looks up from his hands. “What do I do?” he asks, and he has never heard his own voice sound so desperate.

“Wake me up in the middle of the night,” says the man Yusuf has nursed and been nursed by through countless illnesses, because Nicolò is not wrong. The difference is that those were temporary. “Tell me when you need food, or water, or comfort, or medicine. Let me do your laundry and clean your weapons when you cannot—and tell me when you cannot.” He is so gentle, slowing down even further when he sees Yusuf’s terrified expression. “It doesn’t have to be all at once. But please let me continue to do what I’ve done before. To care for you.”

“Alright,” he says, and he is sobbing, gripping the sheets so hard his knuckles pale. Nicolò pauses with a hand above his shoulder, and settles the arm around him when he nods. 

“And on the weeks when I cannot bear to be touched?” he asks quietly, looking at his legs because he could not stomach seeing Nicolò’s expression; it’d be like wrapping his palm around an ember, except it wouldn’t heal. “Or if a mission arises and I can’t leave my bed—or when I can’t care for you in return—”

Nicolò shushes him gently, soothing but not dismissive, petting Yusuf’s hair with his free hand. “I don’t love your body for the things it does,” he says, “I love it for whose it is. Just as I don’t love you for or in spite of your body, but for who you are. I won’t say that those things won’t change anything, because they will, but that’s because we’ll adapt to them; nothing will change how I feel and what I do about it.”

They don’t make love for months on end, and it isn’t a test, but it’s still shocking how the affection in Nicolò’s eyes doesn’t change at all.

*

On the good days, he wakes up in pain but not from pain, and he clenches his jaw for a moment, and he gets up from bed and performs wuḍūʾ and prays, substituting rukū for prostration, and maybe cooks breakfast with Nicky, and maybe sketches while sitting up, and doesn’t make any wounded noises, and smiles easily.

On the bad days, he wakes up from pain after having woken up from pain anywhere from two to six times in the night, and the first thing he does is cry, like a reflex, like an instinct that he can’t suppress but that won’t save him. After all, there’s nothing to fight except his own skeleton, and flight isn’t an option, either, no matter how many nights Nicky murmurs _sogni d’oro, passerotto mio_ into his shoulder. He has a small box with a pad of clean dust, given to him by Andy, of all people—he’s still not sure where or how she found it, since before Nile, Booker was the only one who’d ever shopped online—so he performs tayammum and prays with his eyes, or, on the days he doesn’t want to think about, when something deep-rooted and weary demands he not even attempt to keep his eyes open, prays in his heart. 

He wants to keep sinking. Down is easier than up, treading water is exhausting, mix your metaphors to a pulp and extend them for weeks: he wants out. He wants to take this body to a shady stretch of grass and lay it down and never make it walk again. Booker understood, or at least, he knew how to respond even if he didn’t; he’d bring a hot compress and a flask, hand one off and keep the other, and sit beside him in bed with his back against the headboard.

But Booker flinched at Andy’s blood and not at Yusuf strapped to a table, never even suggested they stop the commandeered car at a drugstore to let some ibuprofen take one one-hundredth of the edge off, so. Lot of good that came to. Maybe he should just be grateful Booker hadn’t told Keane to go for the knees.

He gets it, is the thing, he understands perfectly, up until the point where he doesn’t, where it all shatters into a million shards of rage and anguish. He and Booker, cut from different cloths but with the same fraying seams, and all the lines he’d never cross in order to hold a flame to those unraveled edges. 

And then, most divisive of all, sometimes so quiet a whisper in his chest he wonders if he’s lost it, but no, it persists: at the end of the day, even when he wishes he wasn’t, he is glad to be alive.

*

Nile is the one who hears him screaming.

Her training, both from them and from before them, kicks in immediately in a seamlessly integrated routine. Her assessment of the situation is obvious: no blood, no fire, no forced entry; proceed to the next category of explanation.

“What’s your pain on a scale of one to ten?” she asks, and he laughs. There are tears in his eyes, no, streaming down his face; it always takes a minute to process other input when it’s like this.

“How much is a papercut compared to the first time you died?” he asks, and she wrinkles her brow. “Take that, and reverse it. Death is the papercut.”

“You can talk,” she says slowly, and he nods, then regrets it, tipping his head back into the safety of the pillow.

“That kind of baseline doesn’t really mean much for some people.”

“Is there something I can get you?” she asks, “Medicine, or…”

He doesn’t say _Nicky,_ because that’s unfair to all of them, Nicky’s current mission and Nile’s generosity and Yusuf’s own desperation to remain gentle whenever he can in the face of enough pain to erode his entire personality.

“I have a, uh,” he says, and gestures, “a salve. Not sure where Nicky keeps it,” he says apologetically, and Nile rummages through what must be half their belongings before she thrusts her hand up from a duffle bag grasping the tin, so triumphant that he smiles despite it all. He immediately tucks the memory between his bones, where there’d be intact cartilage instead if bodies, ancient and lovely and wretched, had time for any concept of justice; he’ll need it on another day like this, maybe when Nile’s the one away. He’ll unfold the thought and bask in her innate joy and the relief of how much he loves her for it, another touchstone of proof that he can still feel good things, too. 

She rolls his pants legs up gently but methodically, rubs the salve in without using too much pressure but without treating him like he’ll break, either. “Thank you,” he says, for all of it, and she nods.

“You held my hand while half my internal organs stitched themselves back together, Joe.” She squeezes his hand briefly. “And as soon as they had, you rode that shitty bike ten miles to bring me ice cream. It’s not just you.”

He knows what she means, has heard it from Nicky often enough to recite it: _We take care of each other; it’s mutual. If it wasn’t, I’d still do it, but come on, give yourself some credit here._

_You aren’t a burden. Caring for you is the greatest blessing of my life._

“He’ll have you behind the sniper rifle next,” he says, and he can tell she sees the warmth in his eyes. Nile laughs and kisses his forehead, familial and fond, the way he did when she came back to life screaming after saving a family from a fire, and settles backwards beside him in bed with a book, her feet propped up on the headboard. 

“You’re a good man, Joe,” she says twenty minutes or so later, holding her place in the book with her thumb and looking him in the eye. 

“And you, my dear, are a good woman,” he says, and she grins at him before shifting around and resuming reading. He’ll have to make her something later, maybe a better version of those chocolate cupcakes she keeps staring at in a decades-old magazine. Nicolò will manage to get flour on his nose despite not being allowed in the kitchen when Yusuf is baking, and Andy will check periodically that he’s not getting distracted and standing too long without ever saying that’s why she keeps sticking her head in, and—well, and Booker isn’t here, and Nile isn’t about to try to spike a batch, but she’ll smile, probably, soft and genuinely touched, and that’s the kind of thing that makes him feel like a person, not just a collection of pain signals. Tips the balance to something sweet and joyful and worth it, no matter how the relative statistical compositions of his days may shake out.

*

“I thought it would be the end of suffering,” Copley explains, repentant but still confused, somewhere deep within himself, as to how it hadn’t been. A twisted sort of optimism, really, but part of Yusuf can relate even as he laughs like he’s spitting out a bullet. 

“It wouldn’t have been,” he says, and he can read the _How can you be so sure?_ on Copley’s lips before they even begin to move, but Nicky beats him to it. 

“Whatever this is,” he says, gesturing vaguely to the spaces where a day ago, there were gunshot holes in his shirt, and healed skin beneath them, “if it’s even in our bodies in a way you can pinpoint at all, it is not a panacea. It is not salvation. Your wife,” and he doesn’t even pause, doesn’t wince, doesn’t look away, “would have had the body she did no matter if you’d sacrificed ours to science five years sooner. Love is not a cure, and it doesn’t help either of you to demand it inspire one.” 

Copley looks stunned, like he’s the one who’s been flayed open, staring at Nicky with so many raw emotions on his face that they almost cancel out to nothingness. Nicky has already turned away; he gives Nile a clear _We’ll explain in the car_ look, obviously not wanting her to be out of the loop, but Yusuf thinks she’s probably traced those particular pieces all the way down the dusty and unpaved path to their conclusion. 

“I don’t know if you missed the gunshots,” Andy says then, tilting her head in a smooth and terrifying arc, “in Sudan, I mean—pretty hard to miss that one,” and she points her chin at where her blood still screams from the carpet, the irony clearly intended, “but it’s not like she wouldn’t have died, either.”

Copley takes a shaky breath, and nods once, and Yusuf wonders how many months it’ll be before Copley falls asleep without berating himself in circles first for all the leaps of logic he made without looking first. Booker, too; he isn’t here, but he’s thought it through with the curse of a clearer head by now, or he will soon. 

“There is no out. Not soon enough for it to matter,” he told Yusuf once, on a hard bed in Thessaloniki, so hot they’d kicked the covers to the floor, and then he pointed a finger at the shitty motel television and cried, just a little bit, at Bruce Banner saying how some unrecognizable part of his body spit out the bullet he wanted it to keep. “It’s amazing. The way somebody else could come up with that. They have no idea, and yet they know all about it.”

Yusuf sends Copley an email with a link to that theory that says disability is a natural form of human diversity. He figures he’s smart enough to extrapolate it to quasi-immortal (or maybe re-mortal, over and over again) humans, not only follow the thread but finish the stitch. Copley never says anything, but neither does Nile, only nods once at each of them when Nicky sits beside her in the backseat, Yusuf sitting shotgun, stretching his knees as straight as they’ll go. 

“If you need anything,” she says, and Yusuf nods back. 

“I’m getting better at asking. Got plenty more centuries to practice, right?” And that’s—he can feel Nicky’s eyes on him, evaluating how he means it, but by the sliver of a tired smile, unnoticeable to anyone who knows him any less totally, it’s clear he’s come to the same conclusion: right now, at least, it’s a hopeful sentiment.

**Author's Note:**

> i’m on tumblr @campgender or my disability sideblog @crippleprophet, come say hi!
> 
> “I walk the way a ship sinks” is by Fernando Pessoa, from “A Factless Biography” in The Book of Disquiet  
> the book Nicky reads in the 90s is The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability by Nancy L Eiesland
> 
> I’m not Muslim, so please let me know if any details here should be changed; here are some of the sources I used on disability and prayer in Islam:  
> A response to someone’s question on Quora, which echoed several articles I read, made me cry by saying how if you can’t stand, sit; if you can’t sit, lie down; if you can’t perform certain movements, do them with your eyes; if you can’t do them with your eyes, pray in your heart.  
> This video, among other articles and videos, discussed substituting bowing for prostration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY4m4AfqPqU   
> This video is where I learned about a tayammum pad (for dry ablution, which can be performed before prayer when wuḍūʾ cannot be performed for disability or other reasons): https://www.prayerinislam.com/fatwas-rulings/unable-perform-wudu-due-disability/   
> One version of the pad itself is available here: https://dar-us-salam.com/miscellaneous/prayer-related/245-tayammum-pad-with-dust-for-dry-ablution.html 


End file.
